Bilberry, Medicine and Eyesight: My own story
This blog started out as a a talk about Bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus). Bilberry is in fact one of the very first herbs I ever used, even before I knew anything about medicine and herbalism. The Herb and Start of my Connection to it Now I am finding that it is impossible to discuss this amazing […]
Everything in its right place.
March 2024, around 430 am, Taos NM. The car heater hadn’t caught up with the pre-dawn chill of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as I headed out for one of my clinical rotations in nursing school. Exhausted, I ran through my daily list of what papers needed to be written, what clinical reports had to […]
The Most Important Thing To Know is What To Do.
Sam founded the school in 2007 in San Antonio. Then we expanded to New Mexico, and now include Texas, S. California, Colorado, and Utah as states we offer on-site trainings in. From the first herb walk for students eager to learn about plants up through online courses we do for everyone from curious herbalists, first-timers […]
Why we left Taos (and where we’re going)
We have some really big news to share with all those who have followed us from the beginnings of our school as The Human Path and where it has grown over the last 19+ years into Herbal Medics. This month marks the start of some new changes and expansion that will allow us to do […]
Wilderness First Aid at Herbal Medics Academy
Why I built this course the hard way — and why that’s exactly the point A few years ago I got an email from a husband and wife who had just taken our Wilderness Herbal First Aid course. On their way home from the WFA, through the mountains, they came around a bend and ended […]
Why Herbalism and Modern Medicine Belong Together — And How We’re Teaching It That Way
I’ve been working with herbs for wound healing the late 80’s. But the moment that really crystallized it for me wasn’t in a classroom or a garden — it was in the field in the fall of 1991, during the Special Forces Qualification Course, with a broken thumb and limited options. I won’t go into […]
“Are You Going to Get Him to Higher Care… Before He Dies of Old Age?”
There’s a moment I think about every time I teach a wilderness first responder scenario. A student team had been crouched over their mock patient for close to twenty minutes. They were thorough — I’ll give them that. Checking, rechecking, debating every detail of their primary survey while their “patient” lay there in the dirt, […]
Why Learning Herbal Medicine Isn’t Linear (and That’s A Good Thing)
If you’ve ever tried to learn herbal medicine by following a strict, step-by-step path — one topic at a time, one subject before the next — you’ve probably noticed something: it doesn’t quite work that way. That’s not a flaw in your learning. It’s actually a feature of the subject itself. This was something I […]
When the Cavalry Isn’t Coming: Why I Built a Program to Train the Medics We Actually Need
I heard my bone break before I felt it. It was a sharp crack—the unmistakable sound of something going wrong—as my left hand hit the ground, thumb extended, taking the full impact after I flew over the handlebars of my mountain bike. A small patch of sand. An unimpressive jump. And just like that, I […]
The Integumentary System: What Your Skin Reveals About Healing, Immunity, and Whole-Body Health
The skin is the largest organ in the body—most of us have learned that as a simple anatomical fact. But there is a deeper truth hiding in plain sight: the skin may be the body’s primary interface of intelligence, the place where we meet, interpret, and respond to the world. Not in the way the […]